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In “This World of Tomorrow,” a nostalgic time-travel romance by Tom Hanks and James Glossman, now at the Shed, the Oscar-winning actor (and novice playwright) plays Bert Allenberry, a tech titan dissatisfied with life in 2089. You can’t blame him: even though his existence looks glossy and smooth, every scene set in the future takes place in an office of some kind—“working remotely” must not have survived the sixth extinction.

We actually meet Bert and his girlfriend, Cyndee (Kerry Bishé), in the past, as they amble around the 1939 World’s Fair, in Queens, which is represented by gliding L.E.D. columns showing pixelated images of, for example, the Lagoon of Nations. (Derek McLane designed both the set and the projections.) Bert’s a boss with vague crises on his hands—he’s worried about “Newtonian sequencing” and the “roadblock on our Vox-PAC.” To help him unwind, thoughtful Cyndee has bought them a quarter-billion-dollar getaway from a boutique firm that can send super-wealthy tourists to a narrow slice of the past: a few hours in New York on June 8, 1939.

On Bert’s first trip, he is transfixed by a gee-whiz sentence he hears on a ride: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.” When Bert and Cyndee return to work in 2089—Cyndee is also Bert’s top executive—he repeats the line to his business partner, M-Dash (Ruben Santiago-Hudson). A hurrying future. Bert loves that idea. Enchanted by the technologist optimism of the World’s Fair, Bert returns, several times, alone. On each visit, he meets a local, the beautiful, quietly melancholy Carmen (Kelli O’Hara), and Cyndee is soon forgotten.

Since Bert observes the events of June 8th more than once, he learns exactly how to approach Carmen—by appealing to her precocious twelve-year-old niece (Kayli Carter). This behavior might seem creepy in a man without Hanks’s courtly charm. Hanks, easy onstage, maintains the kind, sorrowful, listening quality that makes him riveting onscreen, but there’s still something amiss in casting him as a lion of industry surprised by love. He and the exquisite O’Hara, who is twenty years younger and cool as three cucumbers, don’t have much in the way of chemistry. (Both actors are so unmodern and elegant that at least they help us remember couples—Bogie and Bacall! Grant and Kerr!—who did.)

Hanks and Glossman borrowed the “hurrying future” line from a real General Motors attraction at the 1964 World’s Fair; the playwright Edward Reveaux wrote it for the voice-over in the Futurama II ride, a sort of showcase of predicted technologies. In other ways, too, the production seems like it was found in an archive rather than made today—the director, Kenny Leon, uses cinematic, old-timey underscoring (Justin Ellington did the sound design); the gender politics can be a little retro (why is Cyndee always bringing Bert coffee?); and then there’s the anachronistic lead himself. The plot certainly has plenty of Hollywood precedents, from “Somewhere in Time” to various episodes of “Star Trek”; as a theatre piece, it recalls the boulevard romances of the nineteen-twenties. But “This World of Tomorrow” is not a classic—it’s a clunker. The futuro jargon (“I’m continuing a system over-lay on the Inner-Structurals with no conclusions”) forms the worst of it, though the direction and the structure, too, are fatally clumsy.

To write “Tomorrow,” Hanks and Glossman adapted several of Hanks’s own short stories, primarily “The Past Is Important to Us,” which he had long hoped might become a movie. Much of the trouble stems from confusion about how a stage text needs to differ from a screenplay—in the number of locations, the allocation of secondary characters, and so on. And, frankly, Bert just isn’t a good enough part for Hanks. Ever since my afternoon at the Shed, I’ve been mentally casting him elsewhere. We should see his Stage Manager in “Our Town.” Or his Willy Loman.

I do recommend that short story, though, which provides some insight into the odd disjunctions of “Tomorrow.” It makes clear that billionaire Bert is a billionaire cad and that he’s concealing the reason for his trips from Cyndee—in the story, she’s his wife, the “fourth and youngest.” Bert’s sudden interest in Carmen seems like an intoxication with a shiny new thing, mirrored by the way the World’s Fair actually operates as a pageant of commodities. In casting the palpably lovable and decent Hanks, the team had to pivot to a Bert who’s also lovable and decent, but a whiff of that selfish ur-Bert from the story remains. “Their Future then was better than our Present is right now,” Bert tells M-Dash, which is a heck of a thing to say about people in 1939. But Bert’s got a girl to woo, and so the world—this poor, poor world—will have to take care of itself.

There’s something almost Oedipal about the devotion that certain men have to women from the past. Is it notable that Bert is falling in love with a woman of a previous generation? What an undemanding fantasy Carmen is: an old-fashioned Greatest Generation stoic who’s also young and has never heard of women’s lib. What would Freud say about such a relationship? It’s a puzzle. How lucky, then, that we can consult the mother of all such May-December romances, now that this fall’s biggest transfer from the West End has arrived at Studio 54.

In Robert Icke’s crackling “Oedipus,” the director’s rewrite of Sophocles’ great tragedy, the bones remain the same: a prophecy tells Oedipus (Mark Strong), who seems to be a man of nearly boundless good fortune, that he has unknowingly killed his father and slept with his mother. In Icke’s modern version, Oedipus is a candidate on Election Night, on tenterhooks as promising results pour in. Throughout, Icke ramps up the erotic energy between Oedipus and his queen—here political wife—Jocasta (Lesley Manville), even a little past the point of the romance-killing revelation that she’s his mum. (You can buy merch in the lobby that says “Truth Is a Motherfucker,” in case you were worrying about spoilers.)

Oedipus’ nox horribilis takes place in his campaign headquarters—a series of impersonal white conference rooms designed by Hildegard Bechtler—as black-clad movers clean it out for the next tenant. (Icke draws attention to tragedy’s cyclical nature; every ending is a beginning is an ending.) As the stage empties, Oedipus’ family gathers to take his mind off the ballot returns: his wife makes jokes about being roughly thirteen years older than he is; his daughter Antigone (Olivia Reis) brings her college-philosophy textbook with her, and she and her uncle Creon (John Carroll Lynch) discuss the riddle of the Sphinx; and Oedipus’ apparent mother, Merope (a stunning Anne Reid), keeps badgering him for a word, worried about his last-minute campaign promise to reveal his birth certificate.

Meanwhile, a countdown clock in the background ticks toward the instant when the votes will be tabulated. In a marvellous bit of directorial peacocking, at the precise moment the clock hits 00:00:00, Oedipus finally learns everything he needs to know.

Strong, whose big-hearted Oedipus flashes into aggrieved petulance whenever he meets with even the slightest opposition, tightens his jaw to the cracking point, and this ought to be foreshadowing enough. But Icke cannot stop himself from alerting us to his script’s cleverness by including a host of double entendres—“You’ll be the death of me,” Jocasta says, looking up at her husband adoringly—and flirting with the border between horror and farce. Icke’s sensibility is defiantly icky: he has the accidentally incestuous couple fondle and kiss and fumble in each other’s underwear. He does, though, eventually redirect the night back toward a more sincerely felt atmosphere of tragedy, handing an eleventh-hour monologue to Manville, who gives a long speech about a past that Jocasta hoped to have buried with a certain baby. Icke destabilizes the old Sophoclean calculus: what happened to Jocasta as a thirteen-year-old far surpasses anything that Oedipus will suffer. But, of course, it’s his name up there on the marquee. Mothers never get the credit they deserve. ♦

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Vince Gilligan’s new show, “Pluribus,” opens with an unconventional apocalypse. A benevolent alien hive mind descends on Earth, commandeering the bodies of all but a handful of people who appear to be immune, including a curmudgeonly writer named Carol Sturka. Though the world that the “joined” are building seems ideal—no more crime, efficient resource distribution, an end to discrimination—it doesn’t leave much room for Carol’s messy humanity. Is it worth it? On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss “Pluribus” and other perfect societies imagined and enacted by artists and intellectuals, from Thomas More’s 1516 satire, “Utopia,” to the Shaker movement and beyond. They reflect on why these experiments have rarely held up to scrutiny or benefitted more than a select few, and why we keep coming back to them anyway. “I’m not the most optimistic person,” Fry says. “But if you’re stuck in pessimistic, dystopic thinking, are you foreclosing on greater promise or greater potential of imagination?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Pluribus” (2025-)
“Breaking Bad” (2008-13)
“Better Call Saul” (2015-22)
“The X-Files” (1993-2002)
“The Giver,” by Lois Lowry
“Utopia,” by Thomas More
“Les Guérillères,” by Monique Wittig
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977)
“The Testament of Ann Lee” (2025)
“The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins
“Utopia for Realists,” by Rutger Bregman
“Ragtime” (1996)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Paul Mezcal
This is actually a nice blended Irish whiskey with an unfortunate typo on the label. All of the malt is ground into grist by Paul Mescal’s famously powerful thighs. Sláinte!

Drake’s Old-Fashioned
Emphasis on the “old.” Sure, Drake is just trying to manage optics, but damn if that Angostura doesn’t have a lovely zip to it. All proceeds go to Drake’s legal team.

Walton Goggins’s Weirdly Hot Jalapeño Tequila
Like Walton Goggins, this tequila is weirdly hot. Like Goggins’s career, it’s a slow burn. And, like Goggins’s character on “Fallout,” you’ll get absolutely nothing on the nose.

Nancy’s Summer Sundowner
Made with a crisp gin and bubbly tonic, Nancy Pelosi’s new canned cocktail is best enjoyed in retirement while watching the sun set on a dying empire.

Aaron Rodgers’s “CBD”-Infused Seltzer
Why is “CBD” in quotes? Don’t ask. Not because there’s ayahuasca in the seltzer (there is), but because, if you ask, Rodgers may have a psychedelic flashback to meeting the Hat Man.

Sydney Sweeney’s Pure White Rum
O.K., this is starting to feel intentional.

Chet Hanks’s Authentically Black Rum
This has always felt intentional.

Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s Cherry Lager
If two actors who co-starred in an old TV series don’t slap their names on some hooch, did the show even exist? This sour-cherry beer is totally undrinkable, but no one cares, because Ted Danson is a national treasure.

Elon Musk’s XXX
Do you love the refreshing taste of Corona? So does Elon Musk! That’s why he bought Anheuser-Busch and renamed one of their flagship beers “XXX.” (Take that, Dos Equis.) Corona is traditionally served with lime, but, due to mass safety-and-regulations layoffs, Musk’s XXX is served with Lyme.

Elizabeth Holmes’s Bloody Lizzy
Costing sixteen dollars in seed money per bottle, and spuriously touted as the first drink that only takes one drop to get you drunk, the F.D.A. might not approve—but your taste buds will.

Adrien Brody’s Long-Aged Whiskey
Each barrel of this pretentious dram was filled when Adrien Brody started his Oscars speech and bottled when he finished. The result is a smooth, robust flavor that can’t be played off the stage. All proceeds go to Adrien Brody.

The New Yorker contributing writer Anna Russell joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the rise of family estrangement in mainstream culture. Recent studies have found that more than a quarter of all Americans are currently estranged from a relative. They talk about how the idea of going “no contact” has gained traction in mainstream culture, the personal and generational shifts that can lead people to distance themselves from relatives, and why family bonds feel less inviolable than they once did. They also look at the political disagreements that can lead to decisions to cut off contact, whether close family relationships can survive deep ideological divides, and what therapists and researchers say about the prospects for reconciliation following estrangement.

This week’s reading:

“Why So Many People Are Going ‘No Contact’ with Their Parents,” by Anna Russell

“The Meaning of Trump’s Presidential Pardons,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

“Nick Fuentes Is Not Just Another Alt-Right Boogeyman,” by Jay Caspian Kang

“The Darkest Thread in the Epstein E-mails,” by Jessica Winter

“Kash Patel’s Acts of Service,” by Marc Fisher

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

When the Albanian political philosopher Lea Ypi was growing up, her grandmother, Leman Ypi, would tell her that during her honeymoon—which took place in Italy in 1941, when war raged throughout Europe and at the edges of the Pacific—she was “the happiest person alive.” Decades later, Ypi wondered how Leman, “no fascist apologist,” had managed to experience joy amid so much devastation—not just in the midst of war but also years later, when her family was persecuted in Albania during the reign of the Stalinist Enver Hoxha. “Indignity,” Ypi’s latest book, is devoted to the question of how her grandmother weathered her tumultuous life—a capability that, Ypi learns, was deeply tied to a sense of dignity. Not long ago, Ypi sent us some thoughts on a few books about dignity that have played a part in her exploration of the topic. Her remarks have been lightly edited.

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

by Immanuel Kant

This book is one of my favorites for a combination of personal and philosophical reasons. I was brought up in Albania by my grandmother, who was born in Salonica (as Thessaloniki was known when it was part of the Ottoman Empire) to an élite Ottoman family, but suffered a lot in Communist Albania as a single mother and the wife of a political prisoner. She lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, fascism, Nazism, communism and the post-communist years, and yet always insisted that even though she lost so much—wealth, status, connections—she never lost her dignity. Dignity, she would say, is connected to our capacity to do the right thing, to a moral dimension of freedom.

Kant’s “Groundwork” helped explain this intuition to me. In the book, Kant reflects on the source of moral duties and suggests that what is distinctive about humans, compared with other species, is our capacity to take a critical distance from our immediate passions and inclinations. We can reflect on how these things affect others, and how they contribute to a purposeful life in which other people are not treated as mere means to an end, but as beings with inner worth. It is a view that connects dignity to moral will, and that explains how people can find resources to resist even when enduring extreme hardship.

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

by Friedrich Schiller

Nowadays, the idea of human dignity serves as the core of many international legal and political documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet it has a paradoxical character that I find fascinating. On the one hand, it’s absolutely inviolable. On the other hand, it’s grounded in legal and political documents that are meant to protect it—and often fail miserably.

This apparent tension, both the inviolability of dignity and its fragility, is at the heart of the thinking of the German poet Friedrich Schiller, whose “Letters” confront the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be. This text was written in the late eighteenth century, but it resonates strongly with the present. One reason for this is that it asks what can give hope at a time of conflict, injustice, and political disillusionment. Schiller contends that hope can come in the form of the redeeming power of art—in art’s capacity to mediate between feelings and moral imperatives, and in a kind of aesthetic education that reflects our moral vocation.

The Radetzky March

by Joseph Roth

When I first read “The Radetzky March,” which was published in 1932, I was immediately struck by the way that Roth captures the fragility of a whole social world. The book, which follows one family, the Trottas, across three generations, takes place in the Habsburg Empire—a world that is held together by rituals and assumptions that are very different from those that structure the world in which we live today.

In the Trottas’ era, the dominant conception of dignity was connected to rank and status. The book shows how, as the political order changed, so, too, did the meaning of dignity. While writing about my grandmother’s life, I found myself thinking often of the parallels between her world and that of Roth’s masterpiece. I dwelled on the way that he depicts—with humor and sadness—the fortunes of a family shaped by the shifting meaning of identity and its connection to dignity. For the Trottas, identity wasn’t tied to a single country but rather bound up with the imperial order, and with their duty to this larger system of the Empire. But then, as the Empire disintegrates, so do their senses of self have to change.

Oblomov

by Ivan Goncharov

One of the most devastating objections to the Kantian conception of dignity is the idea that morality isn’t grounded in reason or freedom but in power relations—that moral norms are just the product of domination, dressed up as universal law.

I’ve always found that a very hard proposition to argue against, except perhaps by pointing out its consequences: that if you take it seriously, you’re left with a kind of moral nihilism that makes any motivation to act pointless. This, in turn, makes the objection against Kantianism weaker—after all, most of us get up in the morning, feed our children, read the news, go to work, look after elderly parents, and so on.

Goncharov’s brilliant novel “Oblomov,” which was published in 1859, examines what it is like to lead a nihilistic life consistently. The first section is about how the title character does not want to get out of bed. It’s both tragic and comic; Goncharov doesn’t judge Oblomov. He just lets the reader live inside his stasis, showing them what it means to lead a life without moral commitment—not out of evil or ill will but because one has lost the basic faith in humanity that underpins action itself. The novel really demonstrates the way in which, without that kind of faith, everything, from love to the most mundane act, is impossible. Everything, including suicide.